Humble beginnings

Alice Munro's new story collection, as much a memoir as a set of fictions, finds her up to her ankles in ivy searching for a forgotten grave. Karl Miller on a work in which the past makes sense of the present

Humble beginnings

Alice Munro's new story collection, as much a memoir as a set of fictions, finds her up to her ankles in ivy searching for a forgotten grave. Karl Miller on a work in which the past makes sense of the present

Saturday 28 October 2006 18.45 EDT
First published on Saturday 28 October 2006 18.45 EDT

This summer I stood with two friends in a country churchyard hidden away in the Scottish Borders. We stood at the grave of the novelist and poet James Hogg, "the Ettrick Shepherd", author of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, who herded sheep for much of his life and was often referred to as "poor Hogg". All four of us count in different degrees as working-class country folk by origin, as does the writer of stories Alice Munro, Hogg's descendant. She says in her new collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock, that her family from the hinterland of Ontario were "poor people", the sort who are "burdened with more intelligence than their status gives them credit for".

You get to Ettrick churchyard by climbing an avenue shaded by tall dark trees keyed to the long sleeps that lie ahead. Ranged round a kirk rebuilt in the 1820s, it's a compact little spot, the locals tightly marshalled. Hogg is interred together with his kin. The grave of his maternal grandfather, the last man in the region to converse with the fairies and an ancestor shared with Alice Munro, carries a lightsome epitaph worded by Hogg: here, grounded, lies "the far-famed Will o' Phaup, who for feats of frolic, agility and strength had no equal in his day". Inside, the kirk is as wooden as a cigar box, with the pews dominated from on high by a pulpit that suggests an eagle's spread wings. The Presbyterian minister Thomas Boston was once the eagle of the parish: Calvinist, miserabilist, strong on original sin, famous for his books and sermons.

The friends who stood with me in homage to Hogg and his leaping grandfather were the poet Seamus Heaney and the novelist Andrew O'Hagan - Irish, the three of us, or, in Andrew's case and mine, Ir-ish, since we are also Scottish, brought up in Scotland and attached to it (though not "proud" of it, in the manner expected of patriots). I was brought up as a Presbyterian, while the others are of Catholic stock. We were engaged in the old-fashioned pursuit of driving round the south of the country looking at places of literary interest, the whereabouts, mainly, of Hogg and Robert Burns, such as the bridge where Tam o' Shanter's mare lost her tail to a witch, and Tibbie Shiel's Inn by St Mary's Loch where Hogg was friends with the landlady, whose firm views ("Hogg was a gey sensible man, for a' the nonsense he wrat") are almost outdone by the present landlady's, and whose photographs hang on the walls, a handsome face of Bostonian gravity, conscious finally of her coming death.

On returning to London, I received a proof copy of the latest collection of Munro's stories, which begins in the Ettrick Valley with an attention to Will o' Phaup's tombstone and a role for Hogg's cousin James Laidlaw, who left Ettrick for North America at the age of 60 and settled in Ontario, where a descendant begat Alice Munro. The story describes how, on the top of Edinburgh Castle, Laidlaw, in his cups, had informed his children that to look over to Fife was to behold the shores of America. He is studied with recourse to his letters, which I consulted when I wrote a biography of Hogg. He was an opinionated and bigoted fellow, and Munro has him down as a shipboard buttonholer. He believed in the justified sinner and objected to Canada's Methodists for supposing that a man may be justified, accepted by God, "and fall from it to-morrow", the just being for ever secure. He would have had no time for Catholics. He pities his cousin, "Hogg, poor man", for spending his time "coining lies" (Munro gives "conning"). Poor Hogg made things up and got more money for his lies, according to Laidlaw, than Thomas Boston ever did for his sermons.

Writing, of the literary sort, was unfavourably known as "making things up" in the Ontario of Alice Munro's (née Laidlaw) girlhood, where pioneer-puritan severities had yet to disappear and the notion of punishment was popular. "Not just Presbyterians but almost everybody else believed that God rewarded lust with dead babies, idiots, hare-lips and withered limbs and club-feet." (James Hogg's opinion of illegitimate children, of which he had one and possibly two, could come uncomfortably close to that.) An account of one of Munro's fictional girls gives a clear indication of what country life could mean for Alice Laidlaw when she began to seem strange to those around her and to call attention to herself and to make things up: "Her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or an extra thumb." Art, as well as lust, could attract the wrath of God.

Her daughter Sheila Munro writes in her memoir Lives of Mothers and Daughters that she has found herself unable to "unravel the truth of my mother's fiction from the reality of what actually happened". In the foreword to the new collection, which moves from the pioneers to the end of her first marriage, her mother's death and the advent of a stepmother she doesn't get on with, Munro observes that these stories, compiled over the years, are different from her other stories by virtue of their relative proximity to the facts of her life. For all that, they are fiction. "You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative."

This leaves you feeling that these stories are like the others after all, being at once her life and her art. Old questions, including James Laidlaw's, about art's lies and feigning arise here, as they do elsewhere in the book, when Munro alludes, cannily enough, to "canny lying of the sort you can depend upon a writer to do".

The new stories make use of family papers and public records. Munro once spent time looking and learning in Selkirkshire, with its heritage of battles and ballads and the spirits of the glen. There were those in her earlier life who thought that writing meant handwriting; her stepmother assured her that her father wrote better than her. But he was also a writer in the other sense: late in life, after his years as a fox farmer and nightwatchman, he wrote about the pioneer life of his forebears, and he was not the only family member who could, in that sense, write. The diary of young Walter Laidlaw, James's son, lends quotations. The archives offered her plenty of stuff to incorporate and supplement, including items unfamiliar to me as a biographer of Hogg. The high house of Phaup, up in the hills above Ettrick kirk, near the burial place of Hogg's sinner, is identified - correctly, I think - as the place where Hogg's shepherd friends met for debates and were held to have caused the disastrous storm of 1794 by trying to raise the Devil. This is the region where the Ettrick and the Yarrow start their streams, purling down towards Walter Scott's baronial Abbotsford and the Tweed.

"I grew older. I became useful around the house. I learned not to give lip. I found ways to make myself agreeable," Munro writes. Her stories represent her as vulnerable, and as thought to be difficult. Her writing father, to whom she was close, searingly beat her: an event described and adapted in the past and described and adapted again now. It would be a considerable mistake to underrate the profound effect of her adolescent sense of incongruity and rejection, which had to make what it could of the impending counterculture of the 60s, when shaggy clothes and long hair and a long-presaged liberation reached the prairies. Her daughter relates that Charles Kingsley's injunction used to be talked of in the family as she grew up: "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever." And that her mother would recall: "I thought I'd do the opposite." Her mother thought that niceness could be "a terrible abnegation of self". But she'd also wonder whether the counterculture might have "made me self-centred".

Poetry and poverty and sexual love are leading concerns of the poetry of Burns, and Munro deals with them, too. The favourite lines of verse spoken of here as filling her young head led on to the poetry of her stories. Several of them are about menial tasks, and two of the greatest and most affecting, "Walker Brothers Cowboy" and "Thanks for the ride", are about love. In the new collection, a girl like her takes up with a broad-shouldered Salvation Army stable boy (the Salvation Army bit is invented), and trysts with him in a hayloft, where the romance suffers a marvellous complication. She likes to lie longing on the ground, staring up into the foliage of an apple orchard, and her desire for the boy is made vivid with nothing at all in the way of show or exclamation. Aware of, but not sold on, the hippies of the time, she was never a poet of the counterculture. She finds a mystery in sexuality, but was never a sex priestess. And the candour and verisimilitude of her treatment of "lust" has survived long after flower power shed its petals. The conclusion of the story recalls that "it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom." Books apart, though, "it was not as if I had given up on passion. Passion, indeed, whole-hearted, even destructive passion was what I was after. Demand and submission."

There's a story in the collection, as in a previous book, in which she visits her father in hospital, where he is dying. She no longer taxes herself, she reflects, with the deep questions - are we right about evolution, and the like - which she used to think about. "Now I think about my work, and about men." It is as if she is saying this to severe James Laidlaw of Ettrick. The story then takes a sharp turn, which points to the breadth of register in her family-oriented fiction. Her stepmother's dog has been constipated, but a breakthrough is about to occur, in time for a family snack. Her stepmother is overjoyed. "I can tell by the sound he makes when he's got it worked down into a better position where he can make the effort. There's some pie left, we never finished it, would you rather have the pie?" Munro picks up a ham sandwich.

The collection, which has opened in Ettrick and gone with the pioneers to Illinois and on their great trek north to Ontario, ends with a return to the genealogy of the pioneers and with the author up to her ankles in poison ivy as she searches for a forgotten grave. This is a rare and fascinating work, in which the past makes sense of the present and the present makes sense of the past, and the two are both a continuum and a divorce. It is very much a memoir, as well as a set of fictions. But then the whole corpus of Munro's stories is a memoir, the novel of her life. It is silly to complain, as some once did, that she writes not novels but stories. The book says barely anything about Hogg's Confessions, but it's more than likely that the novel has been an influence on what she has done. She is the cooler, the more deliberate artist of the two, her tales plainer. But they can be drawn all the same to uncertainty and contradiction. "When you write about real people you are always up against contradictions."

Moved by the power, for all its faults, of country life, I am able to think of Munro, and of my travelling friends and myself, as figures in a pre-industrial landscape, one embodied in the here and now. When the lights are low, I feel that we belong to an archaic world of peasants and spirits.

When Alan Hollinghurst called me Professor Ettrick for a satirical cameo in his novel The Line of Beauty, about high life in London in the 1980s, he was referring to a very small, dispersed place, still quite lonely, a far cry from the novel's Notting Hill Gate. Ettrick, though, with its art and ancient bloodshed, its writers and its reivers, has a past which allows you to say that this is a place which has taken part in the minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in the history and literature of Scotland, and in the making of Canada and of Canadian literature. It is good to think of Alice Munro walking about its absence of streets.

· Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock is published by Chatto & Windus this week (£15.99)